In response to New York City Districting Commission’s latest proposal for redrawn City Council district boundaries, Councilman David G. Greenfield issued the following statement:
“I am very upset that the Districting Commission ignored the pleas of the Orthodox Jewish community and proposes marginalizing southern Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. The proposal would squeeze a large portion of the Orthodox Jewish community into one majority district, while spreading the remainder of the community among seven districts. If this proposal is adopted, Orthodox Jewish voters in southern Brooklyn will comprise a small minority in each of these seven neighboring districts.
“This proposal is unfair and will reduce the voice of the large and growing Orthodox Jewish community and its representation in City Hall. These lines are harmful to southern Brooklyn’s Jewish community. That’s why I am calling on the Districting Commission to reject them.”
(YWN Desk – NYC)
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5 Responses
Unless one can convince the Supreme Court to hold that ethnic and religious discrimination in gerrymandering is illegal – he loses. The Democrats have good reason to want to try to deprive Jews of political influence – we disagree with them.
Or, they can all just move to Israel where they will have an entire city council that can be Jewish!
Absent some historical evidentiary showing that a particular class had been deliberately marginalized through gerrymandering, a court will not intervene so that “frum yidden” have more than one majority district. First of all, religion has NEVER been recognized as a “protected class”. Further, what is a frum yid? How does a court define residents who are shomrei torah umitzvos? Should we have separate districts for chassideshe and litvashe residents? Should the Zalmanites be entitled to recognitino separately for political purposes from teh Aronites?
we actually usually vote democrat.
#3- The Supreme Court never reached the issue in the major case in the area, in part since the Jews’ lawyers decided to argue on racial rather than ethnic and religious grounds. It’s quite possible that gerrymandering designing to “punish” a religious or ethnic minority might be illegal and either Federal or New York law (one gets to argue the matter under each system). The smoking gun might be legislative history showing that frum Jews were being deliberately discriminated against (the previous case was on other issues since arguably they were gerrymander to reward Blacks and Hispanics for being good party stalwarts – not punishing Jews for being uppidty).